It was pretty unfunny to watch how Huawei of PRC was kicked out of many engineering bodies by the chief patent troll in the oval office in 2019.

Let's hope they won't resort to banning Gigatron from export to China or some baloney like that. I hope they can't do that with open hard/soft/warez.

There was however, a trade embargo in place decades back when ECL semiconductor technology was "the thing". A Gigatron built with ECL gates would have been contraband if destined for the Soviet Union, which they call Russia these days.

I remember a funny April's fools day joke in my favourite Compy magazine named c’t

It went along the line of them discovering a virus which was able to run machine code backwards by flipping the execution-direction control-bit of the i80286 CPU and executing a secret OPcode.

Now, programmers knew that no such bit existed of course. But could one not modify the Gigatron with a little DIP-switch or control-bit in order to make the program counter actually either increment as well as decrement - thereby going back or forth in the binary?

would be a first in the industry as far as I can tell. Would open potential for super-compact code used twice at runtime. may well freak out the debuggers of course.

A disturbing trend is countries making it against the law to have encrypted files on your hard drive unless you have the means to decrypt them. The problem here is when innocent people have files that are not encrypted and the government thinks they are. An obvious example would be having a huge file of random numbers or white noise. It is only nonsense and contains no pornography, terror information, espionage, or anything to do with the sale of contraband. Noise and random numbers are sometimes put in files since software random number generators have flaws. For instance, if you are using random number generators to create white noise as masking noise to help sleep, your subconscious mind might find the "seam" where the sound loops back around and the software generated random number table starts over.